Vettel's 1st friday

By Andrew Cutler
August 3 2007

Sebastian Vettel finally got to take the STR2 out for a 'spin' (I don't nean that literally) today as Scuderia Toro Rosso gears up for the Hungarian GP. While he worked on learning what, for him, is a new car, teammate Vitantonio Liuzzi struggled somewhat with finding an ideal set-up.

In the end, Tonio would place 18th fastest in the morning session at 1:24.976. He would improve on that time in the afternoon by posting a 1:23.136, but would slip down to 19th on the charts.

For his part, Sebastian would log an impressive 16th in the morning with a time of 1:24.095. his afternoon mark would come up by nearly a second to 1:23.148, but that would only be good enough for a 20th place ranking.

Here are their post session comments:

Vitantonio Liuzzi:
“This was not an easy day as the track was evolving through both sessions. The track surface had a lot of marbles on it and it was difficult to complete a good clean lap, as can be seen by the fact many people made some mistakes. This made it difficult to put in consistent laps for a long run. We have to work on our set-up and so I don't think our lap times are representative of where we should be, but we did not put everything together. Overall, the car is not bad but we have to improve over a long run as we seem to have trouble with graining as this circuit is hard on tyres.”

Sebastian Vettel:
“I have enjoyed my first day and everyone has made me feel very welcome and already I have the impression that I am a full team member. The most important thing today was to get some experience in the car and in that respect I feel we did a good job, picking up a lot of useful data for tomorrow and for the race. I feel good and it was a pleasure to drive the car. Of course, everything about this car is different to what I have driven before, as every car has different controls on the steering wheel and different modes, so I worked on getting used to this.”